Embracing Chaos

I’m currently traveling in mainland China. One of my primary reasons to be here is to practice my
Mandarin. I lived in the town of Jinan for the better part of 2001, and by the end of my stay had a rough
conversational grasp of the language. For cultural and geopolitical reasons I’d like to keep this skill. I’m also planning on going to China’s Global Debutante Ball in Beijing in 2008 and a
little force-fed practice now can’t hurt.

I think of myself as a dilettante polyglot – I have or have
had a smattering of many languages – Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Japanese,
Russian – but little command of any except English and Mandarin. My friends sometimes tell me that I have a
talent for languages. I think I’m just
determined and study hard. But if I put
my mind to it, I can pick up useful skills in a new language in a couple of
weeks. One of the reasons I love
traveling is this intellectual challenge and the cultural opportunities that
are exposed by overcoming it. So over
the years I’ve consumed a great many books on foreign language self-study. It’s one of the largest sections on my
bookshelf. When I’m studying at home, I
find value in a great variety of tools – thick dictionaries, audio lessons,
conjugation books, children’s books, etc. 

When I’m actually traveling there’s only one book I want
with me: The Rough Guide
Dictionary/Phrasebook. They’re
published for just about every language you might want. These aren’t your typical phrasebook filled
with a collection of pre-selected sentences and mock conversations organized by
subject like “getting a hotel” and “at the train station.” These frustrate me because if finding
something that doesn’t exactly fit into one of their scenarios is nigh
impossible.

In contrast, the majority of each Rough Guide Dictionary/Phrasebook is an English/Foreign
and Foreign/English dictionary. They’re
quite small, but the vocabulary is well chosen, so for most things you want to
say, look it up and it’s there. It’s also
much better than a typical pocket dictionary because Rough Guide tries hard to list just
one translation which is the most useful. This makes study a lot easier than if you have to decide which of the 3
or 4 translations you want to try using and remember. If there is ambiguity they’ll generally use
the word in several example sentences. And for a few key words (like Hotel or Telephone), they will have sample
conversations. One of the only downsides
is that their English is really British, so sometimes I have to do an extra
translation step to find what I want. (i.e. How do you say cookie in British?) 

Each book also include a couple dozen pages of grammatical
reference which are actually enough to get you going from nothing if you have
any experience with linguistics. There’s
usually sections dedicated to menus and signs, but I haven’t found much value
in them personally.

So if you have or want to have even a moderate grasp of a
foreign language, cast off that Lonely Planet or Berlitz pulp – grab a Rough
Guide Dictionary Phrasebook and you won’t be sad.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 5th, 2006 at 12:16 AM and is filed under China, Ego, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.